Development and validation of a 3-D deep learning system for diabetic macular oedema classification on optical coherence tomography images.

OBJECTIVES

To develop and validate an automated diabetic macular oedema (DME) classification system based on the images from different three-dimensional optical coherence tomography (3-D OCT) devices.

DESIGN

A multicentre, platform-based development study using retrospective and cross-sectional data. Data were subjected to a two-level grading system by trained graders and a retina specialist, and categorised into three types: no DME, non-centre-involved DME and centre-involved DME (CI-DME). The 3-D convolutional neural networks algorithm was used for DME classification system development. The deep learning (DL) performance was compared with the diabetic retinopathy experts.

SETTING

Data were collected from Joint Shantou International Eye Center of Shantou University and the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Chaozhou People's Hospital and The Second Affiliated Hospital of Shantou University Medical College from January 2010 to December 2023.

PARTICIPANTS

7790 volumes of 7146 eyes from 4254 patients were annotated, of which 6281 images were used as the development set and 1509 images were used as the external validation set, split based on the centres.

MAIN OUTCOMES: Accuracy, F1-score, sensitivity, specificity, area under receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC) and Cohen's kappa were calculated to evaluate the performance of the DL algorithm.

RESULTS

In classifying DME with non-DME, our model achieved an AUROCs of 0.990 (95% CI 0.983 to 0.996) and 0.916 (95% CI 0.902 to 0.930) for hold-out testing dataset and external validation dataset, respectively. To distinguish CI-DME from non-centre-involved-DME, our model achieved AUROCs of 0.859 (95% CI 0.812 to 0.906) and 0.881 (95% CI 0.859 to 0.902), respectively. In addition, our system showed comparable performance (Cohen's κ: 0.85 and 0.75) to the retina experts (Cohen's κ: 0.58-0.92 and 0.70-0.71).

CONCLUSIONS

Our DL system achieved high accuracy in multiclassification tasks on DME classification with 3-D OCT images, which can be applied to population-based DME screening.